Friday, 31 May 2013

Pages from the Goncourt Journals ...

Succès de scandale

Their novels might be unreadable and forgotten, but the
Goncourt brothers' journals - to which they confided all their thwarted
ambition, literary gossip and backbiting - are a delight, discovers Geoff Dyer

Among many other things the Journal is a vast archive of
anxiety and thwarted ambition. The brothers Goncourt began keeping it on what
was, for them, a momentous occasion: the publication, on December 2 1851, of
their first novel. Unfortunately, it was also a momentous day for France:
Napoleon III seized power in a coup d'état. With the city under martial law
their eagerly- anticipated debut made almost no impact. So the Journal became a
repository of all the woes and disappointed hopes suffered in their "hard
and horrible struggle against anonymity": critical indignities, lack of
sales, the perfidy of reviewers, the unmerited success of friends (some of
whom, like Zola, were celebrated for techniques the Goncourts claimed to have
pioneered).

As happens, lack of success only increased the brothers'
sense of neglected worth. "It is impossible to read a page by them,"
André Gide confided in his journal, "where that good opinion they have of
themselves does not burst out from between the lines." He was referring to
their novels (now almost entirely forgotten) but this sense of wounded
self-esteem greatly increases the pleasure of the Journal for which they are
remembered. "Oh, if one of Dostoevsky's novels, whose black melancholy is
regarded with such indulgent admiration, were signed with the name of Goncourt,
what a slating it would get all along the line." That's in 1888; by 1890
the tone is of comic resignation (there is much comedy in these pages) as
Edmond realises that he has devoted the whole of his life "to a special sort
of literature: the sort that brings one trouble".

It's not just the brothers themselves; their friends are
constantly sniping about each other's success or bemoaning the lack of their
own. Zola, "whose name echoes round the world", is particularly
"hard to please." Permanently "dissatisfied with the enormity of
his good fortune", he is "unhappier than the most abject of
failures".

An abundance of famous names renders the most banal entries
compelling. "A ring at the door. It was Flaubert." "Baudelaire
was at the table next to ours." Even people who make only a cameo
appearance are fixed with a precision to match that of the recently invented
camera. The glimpse of Baudelaire continues: "He was without a cravat, his
shirt open at the neck and his head shaved, just as if he were going to be
guillotined."

Unlike photographs, these verbal pictures develop and change
over time, according to fluctuations in the fortunes and health of the people
concerned and their shifting relationships with the authors of the Journal.
Part of the ambition behind the project was to show the Goncourts'
acquaintances - many of whom happened to be the great writers of the age -
"as they really are, in a dressing-gown and slippers". At one point a
fellow guest is shocked by Flaubert's "gross, intemperate unbuttoning of
his nature" but the reader is grateful that the Goncourts were on hand to
witness such things, even when - especially when - the conversation among these
men of letters becomes - as it often did - "filthy and depraved."

Among all the talk of fornication, hookers, venereal disease
and drunkenness there is some literary discussion too, and not just about
"the special aptitude of writers suffering from constipation and
diarrhoea". On first hearing Flaubert read from Salammbo the brothers are
disappointed to discover that he "sees the Orient, and what is more the
Orient of antiquity, in the guise of an Algerian bazaar. Some of his effects
are childish, others ridiculous ... [T]here is nothing more wearisome than the
everlasting descriptions, the button-by-button portrayal of the characters, the
miniature-like representation of every costume." The brothers are often
vehement participants in debate - blasphemously insisting that "Hugo has
more talent than Homer" - but much of the time they are eager flies on a
wall, conscious of the privilege of witnessing a master like Flaubert as he
illuminates what, to him, is truly shocking about the author of Justine:
"there isn't a single tree in Sade, or a single animal."

By the time they meet the author of Madame Bovary he is
already a celebrated writer, already "Flaubert". Others, like the
"strange painter Degas", enter inconspicuously with none of the aura
subsequently bestowed upon them by fame. When they first encounter their
"admirer and pupil Zola" he strikes them as a "worn-out Normalien,
at once sturdy and puny" but with "a vibrant note of pungent
determination and furious energy".

Many people come strolling through the Journal but one young
man who went on to distinguish himself in the world of letters does not appear
to merit so much as a mention. When Henry James met Edmond ("and his dirty
little companions") in 1885 he was struck by "something perverse
& disagreeable" about him. Expanding on this in an interminable review
of the Journal, James is baffled by the way that the "weakness" of
these "furious névrosés" "appears to them a source of glory or
even of dolorous general interest". The fact that they do not appear
anything like so sickly or neurotic to us is proof of a sort that the Goncourts
were right: their malaise was indeed proof of their modernity. The self-styled
"John-the-Baptists of modern neurosis" prided themselves on being
"the first to write about the nerves".

The atmosphere of metaphysical sickness is clearly related
to the dark shadow cast by actual physical illness. In 1861 the death of their
friend Henri Murger had prompted an agonised reflection on mortality. The
unnamed illness that killed Murger was mysterious and rare; syphilis was so
pervasive that in 1877 Maupassant, initially, was "proud" to have caught
"the magnificent pox. At last!" By then Edmond had had seven years to
mourn the utterly unmagnificent death, also from syphilis, of his beloved
brother. Jules's passing made Edmond "curse and abominate literature"
to such an extent that, after describing with clinical precision and agonising
detail the gradual collapse of his brother's physical and mental capacities, he
decided to abandon the Journal.

The habit of daily transcription was not so easy to break,
however, and Edmond soon returned to the task. With the Franco-Prussian war,
the siege of Paris, and the commune, history comes crashing in on the daily
accounts of visits, incidental observations and reflections. The entries from
the post-Jules period are as varied, fascinating, compelling and odd as
anything that has gone before. (I am particularly fond of the passage
describing "the mania for fighting" which so takes hold of Drumont
that "Nature is nothing for him now but a setting for affairs of honour.
When he took the lease on his house at Soisy, he exclaimed: 'Ah, now there's a
real garden for a pistol duel.'") But these later sections are interesting
in two additional and complicating ways.

As early as 1867 the brothers had reflected on the
transience of all pleasures: "Everything is unique, nothing happens more
than once in a lifetime. The physical pleasure which a certain woman gave you
at a certain moment, the exquisite dish which you ate on a certain day - you
will never meet either again. Nothing is repeated, and everything is unparalleled."
Naturally, this affirmation of the unrepeatable uniqueness of all experience -
especially once his brother is no longer there to share, record and analyse it
with Edmond - encourages recollection and reverie. As Edmond ages so he becomes
more and more absorbed by memory.

The second factor in the distinctive quality of the latter
parts of the Journal derives from the fact that in 1886-7, after much
reluctance, Edmund begins publishing them. As a consequence the diaries from
that date onwards have to come to terms with how the earlier ones have been
received - both by the critics and by the people mentioned, described or quoted
in them. The Journal, in other words, starts being about itself.

Plenty of people felt embarrassed, upset, outraged or
betrayed by the Goncourts' record of things they had said or had said about
them. This is part of the Journal's charm and value. Christopher Isherwood,
when he finished reading them, on July 5 1940, was in no doubt as to their
importance in this regard: "Here, gossip achieves the epigrammatic
significance of poetry. To keep such a diary is to render a real service to the
future." This realisation may well have been an incentive to persist with
his diaries which have since acquired a similar value of their own. Or, to put
it another way, it is as if the Journal, which caused people to discuss - and
thereby add to - their content, continues to prompt the same reaction and so,
in a sense, are still being incrementally extended by a constantly expanding
cast of characters, readers and contributors, from the 19th century to Gide,
Isherwood, Vidal and beyond.

Obviously, the Goncourts' Journal has been a wonderful
resource for historians and biographers alike, but not everyone has concurred
with the verdict of Proust's narrator in Time Regained: "Goncourt knew how
to listen, just as he knew how to see." Coming as it does from a work in
which fiction and fact are famously and intimately entwined, this character
reference is itself unreliable and inadmissible. Certainly it is contested by a
conversation recorded by Gide in a journal entry from January 1902:
"'According to what I have been able to verify,' says Jacques Blanche,
'nothing is less true than their journals.'" Claiming to remember
perfectly certain conversations which the Goncourts had falsified Blanche
flatly contradicts Proust: "I assure you, Gide, that they didn't know how
to listen."

Blanche rants on, furnishing more and more examples, only to
have the rug pulled from beneath his feet by the author of The Counterfeiters.
"'But', I say, 'the words that he puts into the mouths of various people,
however false they may be according to you, are almost never uninteresting.
Watch out, for the more you reduce his stature as a stenographer, the greater
you make him as a writer, as a creator.'"

We only have Gide's word that he had the last word in this
exchange way but it reminds us that what we are dealing with here is not simply
a resource but a compendious work of literature. "A book is never a
masterpiece," the brothers declare in 1864. "It becomes one."
The process of becoming is inevitably more awkward for a journal - which did
not even set out to be a book; its imperfections and indiscretions, its lack of
artistic and thematic organisation - all the things, in fact, that make it a
pleasure to read - militate against its ever becoming one. But while
Sainte-Beuve - a major player in these pages - believed his notebooks to be
"the lowest drawer of the writing desk" the Goncourts' Journal has
come to deserve a place in the highest.

· Pages from the Goncourt Journals has just been reissued by
New York Review of Books Classics.

In every generation, one city emerges as the capital of the
republic of letters. This is not necessarily the place where the best writing
is being done: Masterpieces are just as likely to come from Jane Austen's
Hampshire parsonage as from Dr. Johnson's London coffeehouse. It is, rather, a
symbolic homeland of the imagination, a metropolis that sets the terms of
critical judgment and literary debate. Such capitals are inevitably temporary,
passing away as history and chance assemble other geniuses in other places. But
long after they disappear, they retain a peculiar power to seduce the
imagination. How many readers have wished they could talk with Goethe and
Schiller at Weimar, or go to Greenwich Village parties with Hart Crane and
Edmund Wilson?

Of all the cities that have served as literature's capital,
none is more famous or infamous than the Paris of the Second Empire; and no
writers deserve more credit for its legend than the Goncourt brothers. Edmond
de Goncourt, born in 1822, and his younger brother Jules, born in 1830, formed
a partnership that is possibly unique in literary history. Not only did they
write all their books together, they did not spend more than a day apart in
their adult lives, until they were finally parted by Jules's death in 1870.

The Goncourts wrote prolifically in every genre, but they
never had the kind of success they so desperately wanted. They were less
admired than Flaubert, though they shared his devotion to style, and less
popular than Zola, though they pioneered the techniques of naturalism. Their
plays flopped, while Alexandre Dumas got rich from "La Dame aux
Camélias." Their works on history and art were overlooked, as Hippolyte
Taine and Ernest Renan became intellectual demigods. By the time he reached his
60s, Edmond was frantic to do something, anything, to secure his reputation:
"My constant preoccupation," he wrote, "is to save the name of
Goncourt from oblivion in the future by every sort of survival: survival
through works of literature, survival through foundations, survival through the
application of my monogram to all the objets d'art which have belonged to my
brother and myself."

As it turned out, however, it was none of these things that
rescued the Goncourts from "oblivion." It was, rather, their Journals
— the scandalous, vain, vengeful, brutally honest diaries in which the two
brothers, and then Edmond alone, wrote the secret history of their age.
Starting in 1851, the year their first novel was published, and ending just
twelve days before Edmond's death in 1896, the Goncourt Journals helped to
immortalize their period as well as their authors. If we are still fascinated
by the literary life of Paris in the late 19th century — not just the books but
the personalities, the rivalries and friendships, the piquant combination of idealism
and brutishness — we have the Goncourts to thank.

Both the idealism and the brutishness are on full display in
"Pages from the Goncourt Journals" (New York Review Books, 434 pages,
$16.95), a one-volume selection edited by the late scholar and translator
Robert Baldick. This edition, which first appeared in 1962,is the latest of
many delightful books brought back into print by New York Review Books, whose
imprimatur has become a reliable guarantee of reading pleasure. In this case,
the pleasure is decidedly of the guilty variety.

The Goncourts belonged to a world where poets mingled with
princesses, politicians, and prostitutes, and they faithfully reported gossip
from all levels of society, the more lurid the better. Indeed, the most
representative sentence in the Journals may be the one that begins the entry
for September 25, 1886: "This morning in the garden we talked about
copulation." It was a subject that never got boring. A friend of a friend
had a mistress who claimed to have slept with Kaiser Wilhelm II: "She had
orders to wait for him naked, stark naked except for a pair of long black
gloves coming up above her elbows; he came to her similarly naked, with his
arms tied together ... and after looking at her for a moment, hurled himself upon
her, throwing her onto the floor and taking his pleasure with her in a bestial
frenzy."

Swinburne, the English poet, would entertain visitors with
"a collection of obscene photographs ... all life-size and all of male
subjects." Zola had a second family that he hid from his wife; Turgenev
lost his virginity to one of his serfs at the age of 12. Robert de Montesquiou,
the aesthete who was the original of Proust's Charlus, had his first love
affair "with a female ventriloquist who, while Montesquiou was straining
to achieve his climax, would imitate the drunken voice of a pimp, threatening
the aristocratic client."

Many of these stories seem to fall into the category of
"too good to check." But they provide a sense of what conversation
must have been like at the famous "diners de Magny," named after the
Paris restaurant where the Goncourts, Sainte-Beuve, Gautier, and other writers
gathered. It was the world's most illustrious locker-room, where lechery was
ennobled by worldweary romanticism: "Debauchery," the Goncourts wrote
in 1861,"is perhaps an act of despair in the face of infinity."

But the Goncourts' Paris was also an intellectual boxing
ring, where no one was ever allowed to forget his place in the standings: whose
book had sold best, who had gotten a bad review, whose play was booed on
opening night. "Coming away from a violent discussion at Magny's,"
the Goncourts write (using the first person singular, as always),"my heart
pounding in my breast, my throat and tongue parched, I feel convinced that
every political argument boils down to this: ‘I am better than you are,' every
literary argument to this: ‘I have more taste than you,' every argument about
art to this: ‘I have better eyes than you,' every argument about music to this:
‘I have a finer ear than you.'"

The Goncourts, to their unending frustration, usually wound
up at the bottom of the totem pole. They never had the success they thought
they deserved, and over the years they became less and less able to tolerate
the successes of their friends. It is true that their career was dogged by
exceptionally bad luck. The first entry in the journal was made on December 2,
1851, the day the brothers' first novel was published — and also, it so
happened, the day that Napoleon III overthrew the Republic and took power as
Emperor. As a result, the novel was completely ignored — "a symphony of
words and ideas in the midst of that scramble for office," as the brothers
ruefully put it.

The Goncourts' next big chance came in 1865, when their
groundbreakingly realistic play "Henriette Maréchal" was performed at
the Théâtre Français. But once again politics interfered, as protesters drowned
the opening-night performance in "a tempest of hisses," angered by
the playwrights' friendship with the emperor's cousin. Jules died without ever
enjoying a great success, and Edmond spent the rest of his life seething at
younger, more talented writers like Zola and Maupassant. The last third of the
journal alternates between self-pity ("I am condemned to being attacked
and repudiated until the day I die") and jealous digs at friends:
"Maupassant's success with loose society women is an indication of their
vulgarity," Edmond writes in 1893, "for never have I seen a man of
the world with such a red face, such common features, or such a peasant
build."

Many writers think things like this about their rivals, but
few have dared to record them for posterity. The Goncourts' very shamelessness,
their refusal or inability to censor their discreditable thoughts, is what
makes their journals so absorbing — as Edmond himself knew full well. In his
last years, he began to publish the early volumes of the journals, to the fury
of certain friends who found old embarrassments dredged up in print. But he
refused to be intimidated: "Monsieur Renan calls me an ‘indiscreet
individual,'"Edmond told an interviewer in 1890. "I accept the
reproach and I am not ashamed of it... For ever since the world began, the only
memoirs of any interest have been written by ‘indiscreet individuals.'" The
measure of the Goncourts' indiscretion is that their journals are still so
interesting, more than a hundred years later.